Abstract
Many IJMH readers will have learned of the untimely death of Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute of the Study of Slavery and Emancipation and Professor of History at the University of Hull, last July. The wide awareness of Professor Burnard’s passing in and of itself reflects his prolific scholarship as well as the profound influence of this remarkably generous colleague. A preeminent historian of early modern trafficking of enslaved Africans and of enslavement in Anglo-America, especially the British West Indies, as well as a leading authority on British colonization, he occupied the vanguard in effecting a shift in understanding that has made the histories of European overseas empire and of enslavement—and the violence, especially sexual, that was central to enslavement—inseparable.
Listing Trevor’s publications, awards, and fellowships would easily exhaust the space allotted here in of itself yet still might fail to do justice. So, highlights must suffice (without considering the battery of articles and essays he produced or the deserved funding that he has received): from his 1991 study of Maryland planters in the long eighteenth century, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776, to Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World, the painful and painstaking 2004 investigation of the career of a sexual predator from Yorkshire who owned human beings and worked as an overseer in eighteenth-century Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, to The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, the comparative treatment of the most important American colonies in the eighteenth-century British and French Empires he co-authored with John Garrigus, to his books on wider but closely related topics, including The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830, Writing Early America: From Empire to Revolution, and Writing the History of Global Slavery.
Trevor readily leant his expertise to myriad editorial boards, advisory committees (including those involved in the question of reparations and the trans-Atlantic traffic in enslaved Africans), and similar endeavours but he also did so informally by reading manuscripts, commenting officially and unofficially on papers, and writing letters of reference. His standing may best be reflected by his position as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliography in Atlantic History from which he oversaw the production of over four hundred entries by a global assembly of historians who he recruited to compile the literature on an array of topics related to the history of the Atlantic World.
My first interaction with Trevor came through our membership of the founding committee of the Summer Academy on Atlantic History in 2009. We conduct the academy on a bi-annual basis, and it provides a unique opportunity for advanced doctoral students and early career researchers to engage on a one-to-one basis with senior scholars and to present their research in a relaxed yet rigorous environment. Always a careful and thorough participant in our review of the submissions and an enthusiastic participant in most of the prior academies, Trevor hosted last year’s edition in Hull. The ninth incarnation will be held in August 2025 in his honour.
The impressions of Trevor I had formed from our remote encounters were confirmed when I had the great pleasure of meeting him and his wife Deborah in Poitiers, France, in October 2018 when we were invited to give plenary talks at an international colloquium. Over the course of an intense but delightful weekend, we seized the opportunity to learn more about the participants, many of whom were ECRs, and their work.
These discussions culminated in the production of a volume of essays drawn from the conference that was published this past March. This volume included what must have been Trevor’s final essay, “Settler colonialism and early American history”, co-authored with Agnès Delahaye, which tracks the global history of the historiography of European overseas colonization. It transcends, despite its title, America and again illustrates his geographic and topical range. During the editorial process last autumn, Trevor, as always, was an acute collaborator despite his many responsibilities.
Unquestionably, Trevor will be much missed. Yet, he will have a lasting impact through his leadership in overhauling the approach to the topics of early modern European overseas empire and of “early America” and the corresponding promotion of more comprehensive and contextual perspectives on those subjects. He also leaves a great legacy through the cultivation of succeeding generations of historians, a process to which Trevor devoted so much time and energy. They will raise their own questions of the past and advance our knowledge thereby revising previous interpretation, perhaps even Trevor’s. This is what the practice of historiography is all about and no one will have known and appreciated this essential paradox more than he did.